Jason Wood (La Trobe, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Community Safety, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) recognises that Sri Lanka is undergoing a significant economic crisis and unrest;

(2) acknowledges the anxiety and mental distress that the Sri Lankan Australian community is experiencing as a result of these events; and

(3) reaffirms the strong bond of friendship between Sri Lanka and Australia.

Australia and Sri Lanka celebrated 75 years of diplomatic relations this year, and we share a longstanding history of bilateral relations and extensive links underpinned by our amazing 170,000-strong Sri Lanka diaspora community here in Australia. Sadly, Sri Lanka is facing a multidimensional crisis compounded by shortages of food and essential medicines, threatened livelihoods, high inflation, rising commodity prices, power shortages and a lack of fuel. The economic crisis is the worst since the country's independence. The recent economic and political crisis in Sri Lanka has affected not only the great people of Sri Lanka but also the Sri Lankan Australians whose families and loved ones have been caught up in this crisis. The scarcity of fuel and food, as I've said, is having a devastating emotional impact on our local Australian-Sri Lankan community. I have a large Sri Lankan-Australian community in my electorate of La Trobe and I've heard their stories of hardship, anxiety and mental distress due to the state of their families, friends and fellow Sri Lankans as a result of this terrible crisis in their beloved country. I understand their pain for their loved ones back home, as I hear about it every day.

I had the great honour to attend the 'Dance for a Cause' Save a Dream fundraiser dinner dance on Friday 19 August at the Claydon community centre, at the invitation of Dr Lionel Bopage, President, and Ms Sithy Marikar, Vice-President, of the Australian Sri Lankan Association Incorporated. I acknowledge the member for Bruce, Julian Hill, who was also there. I thank him very much for his support and for his support of this motion. The Save a Dream team is a collective of community organisations and individuals in Australia formed in the wake of the current dire socioeconomic crisis in Sri Lanka. The funds raised go towards helping save the lives of newborns—it is just so sad to hear 'newborns'—who require medical attention by assisting in the purchase of much-needed medicines and medical equipment for hospitals in Sri Lanka.

Last Saturday, at the invitation of Naween Pandithasekara and Damitha De Mel from Black & Gold Victoria, I took part in the launching ceremony of a fundraiser cycling campaign for Sri Lanka. Black & Gold Victoria Incorporated has initiated a campaign to raise funds to procure much-needed medicine, equipment and medical apparatus for the Apeksha cancer hospital in Sri Lanka. Again, it's very sad to hear that it's a children's hospital needs this equipment. The appeal, named Ride for Apeksha, is a challenge for all supporters to ride up to 976 kilometres—that's the number of beds in this hospital—in 40 days, from 1 September to 10 October, to raise funds. This initiative is supported by Rotary Australia, and funds are collected under the auspices of the Rotary Australia Overseas Aid Fund. It is doing a great job there.

Can I say, on a personal note, I went to an event organised by Wings of Hope, again supporting Sri Lankan children. My wife and I decided we should do our little bit by sponsoring the education of a young girl in Sri Lanka. I congratulate Wings of Hope, because it's the little things, and if more people made the effort to provide just a bit of funding each month, they could actually change a young person's life.

The current economic crisis in Sri Lanka is propelling into a humanitarian crisis. My heart goes out, again, to the Sri Lankan community at this terrible time. I can assure the Sri Lankan community of the unwavering support of coalition members but also government members. The great thing is that the previous Liberal government and the new Labor government have given bipartisan support to providing humanitarian assistance, including health equipment, to our great friends in Sri Lanka.

I ask the House to acknowledge the anxiety and distress that the Sri Lankan-Australian community is experiencing due to this crisis. I mention again the huge bond of friendship between our two nations. I thank the Sri Lankan community for always being so warm and gracious. I've been to many events in the Buddhist Vihara temple in Berwick, and I've been to so many Buddhist temples, and the Sri Lankan people are so compassionate. They've done so well helping others in Australia, and now they're raising money to help Sri Lankans back home. Again, it's just so sad to hear the newborns and children are in the front line of this disaster.

Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is there a seconder for the motion?

Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'll second the motion. I'm pleased to second the motion moved by a Liberal member of parliament because this is a bipartisan endeavour, and there's concern right across the parliament for the situation that we have seen and are continuing to see in Sri Lanka. I acknowledge your work, as my neighbour, member for La Trobe. We keep it a secret that we actually do collaborate in the community interest and call each other and sort out community issues because it would be bad for both of our reputations if people knew that. It's a bit like you and me, member for Mitchell.

There is enormous sadness and anger at the situation in Sri Lanka, in this the 75th anniversary year of diplomatic relations between Australia and Sri Lanka. The economic crisis and, indeed, the civil unrest should never have happened. We should not be in this situation. I say that in that Sri Lanka is a country I know and love. When I was in high school, an exchange student from Sri Lanka lived with us for nine months—my Sri Lankan brother from up in Kandy, as we call each other. For the rest of her life, my mum—his Aussie mum—went backwards and forwards, spending months at a time in Kandy. People looked at the wedding photos she proudly brought back of her other son. She was always the white chick in the saree at weddings and family gatherings. It's a place I've visited on personal trips, and, indeed, it was the last place I visited before COVID.

Sri Lanka has a complex history. It's a multiethnic, multicultural, multireligious and multilingual country. But things could or should have been very different. Sri Lanka is a country blessed with its geography, sitting right off the coast of India near the entrance to the Bay of Bengal, in a part of the world that's so economically vibrant with a multicultural, multilingual population perfectly poised to engage in trade with the world. Someone said that, if Sri Lankan governments had followed perhaps a different course over many years, it should have been the Singapore of this part of the world. It has incredible natural resources and truly wonderful, beautiful people. And perhaps not all the legacy of colonialism is positive, but it has the base level of infrastructure in governance systems that should have set the country up to succeed. That's what my Sri Lankan friends tell me. Instead, we've seen a failure of governance over many years. I make that point in a very general sense.

People in my community have pointed out to me the endemic corruption over so many years. People can insert their own villains into this. I'm not going to make it a political speech; I'm not trying to set off stuff in the diaspora. But people have observed—and I think with a lot of evidence—that this is a sustained failure of governance over so many years that has led such a beautiful country to the place they're at now, that a moment of such promise economically after the end of the civil war is now a moment of such hardship and despair for so many people. Of course, it's not just for the people in Sri Lanka that we worry; it's for the more than 170,000 Australians of Sri Lankan origin, be they born in Sri Lanka or be they of Sri Lankan decent. Indeed, I think they're our 10th largest ethnic group in Australia, and we have one of the largest, if not the world's largest, Sri Lankan diaspora.

There's enormous pain and worry and anger here. Fifty per cent of these Australians live in Melbourne, many of them in the south-east. There are Tamils, Sinhalese, Burghers, Moors, Malays and people of Chinese origin, all of whom call themselves Sri Lankan Australians. People are not getting basic supplies. They're at risk of missing out on food. They can't get petrol. And the medical crisis is heart-wrenching. On one of our trips, my daughter's life was saved in a hospital in Sri Lanka. It's a story I've told elsewhere for other reasons. She diagnosed herself. She said, 'Dad, I think I've got a DVT.' She was a medical centre receptionist for her part-time uni job. I said, 'Oh, that's a bit dramatic, darling, have some porridge.' She said, 'No, no, we've got to go to the hospital; I've got a DVT.' Sure enough, our friends rallied to the cause and got us through, and it was a Sri Lankan specialist in the ICU ward who did indeed save her life from that blood clot. She will be on blood thinners for the rest of her life. So I know firsthand that the quality in many of the hospitals is world class. They have good surgeons, many of whom trained overseas, and they are doing good work, but they now can't get supplies. People are worried about their family and friends getting into a medical emergency. I applaud the Australian Sri Lankan community for their generosity, for raising money—so much of it for the children's hospitals—and for bringing the whole community together. I particularly applaud my long-term staff member and now volunteer Sithy Marikar, who I've known for many a year, for her leadership within the Sri Lankan Muslim community.

One final thing I would confirm is that the government will continue to provide humanitarian and development assistance. I'm also in dialogue with the minister for immigration and home affairs regarding some of the two-way visa issues, both about people not wanting to return, given the medical care issues right now, and also the need to continue to be reasonable on allowing people to visit.

Alex Hawke (Mitchell, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to support the member for La Trobe on this important motion that the Australian parliament recognise what Sri Lanka has been going through in recent times, since the COVID-19 pandemic. I join my friends, the member for La Trobe and the member for Bruce, in speaking about the importance, after 75 years, of this relationship between Australia and Sri Lanka not just in managing our maritime borders and managing people smuggling but in our economic and people-to-people links which have led to a big diaspora in our major cities of people who have come from Sri Lanka and made Australia their home. And they've been very successful at it, I must say. They are skilled and successful migrants who have turned themselves into great Australians.

We're all devastated to see what has happened to Sri Lanka. It has salient lessons for all countries around the world following the COVID-19 pandemic. It isn't automatic that a country will emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic better, stronger or as well placed as some have. There were real consequences for an economy like Sri Lanka's in terms of turning off tourism, turning off expat dollars coming into the country and turning off important things like access to cheap fuel to power their power plants. It's a salient lesson for governments everywhere, including here, about what happens when you deliberately increase the price of power, power generation, fuel, fuel generation and the basics of living, such as food. What we saw in Sri Lanka, of course, is that, when a government fails in this department of the basic costs of living—the cost of power, the cost of fuel and the cost of food—it leads to revolution because people can't afford to eat and they can't afford the basics. We all lament what has happened in Sri Lanka, but we must observe the lessons of the failure of the government. I know that Australia will take those lessons on board as well.

No country is immune from these challenges in this era, and we see the countries of Europe facing the same problems with the cost of power and the cost of power generation, and the impacts that that will have on the basic standard of living of populations. So, as the opposition, we ask the Australian government to do whatever it can to help our Sri Lankan partners. We welcome Sri Lanka's move to approach the International Monetary Fund and secure that vital loan to make sure that they can sustain their debt—a very serious debt now, which has hit about 79 per cent of GDP—pay that debt, and not be in debt to countries that seek to take advantage of these situations.

Australia, of course, is a good partner in all of these situations. We will help Sri Lanka with our development dollars. We'll help Sri Lanka as friends and partners and neighbours in our region, and, of course, we won't be seeking a return on that help, other than their success, prosperity and stability. We'll continue to urge the Australian government to do that from the opposition benches. But we have seen with concern, reports that China—who has put itself in a debtor position to Sri Lanka—has asked, instead of payment, to own the resources and the resource generating mechanisms of the country of Sri Lanka while they are in financial crisis and debt. We, of course, urge China to be a good international partner and not to take advantage of countries who fall into economic hard times. We ask them to be the right neighbours that they ought to be to countries in their region and to make sure that they do not seek advantage at the expense of the Sri Lankan people.

So we welcome the International Monetary Fund lending money to secure the future of Sri Lanka. It's the right deal. It will mean that Sri Lanka will be able to make its payments, get back on its feet, get its tourism economy going, get its expats financing money again, and, of course, restore the great skills and success that we've seen from the migration population that has come to Australia from Sri Lanka. It's a very successful country and it can get back on its feet again, with good government, with stable government and with government fixed on lowering the cost of living for its population. The Australian government ought to do as much as we can do during this economic crisis. We have been supportive. We need to continue to be supportive. I know that the diaspora here in Australia is doing everything it can to support Sri Lanka and make sure that those expat dollars go back home and stabilise the situation.

We want a strong and sovereign Sri Lanka. We want our friend and partner back on its feet again, succeeding for its population; feeding itself as it always has; succeeding economically; and providing such great, skilled and successful people as it has to the world. Sri Lanka exports so many great products to Australia and around the world. It is a very successful place. It's fallen into a hole. A lot of it has come from COVID. A lot of it has come from some bad decisions. We know Sri Lanka will get back on its feet again. Australia supports Sri Lanka, we support Sri Lanka, and we ask the Australian government to do everything they can to support our good friends and neighbours in Sri Lanka.

Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for La Trobe for putting forward this motion and acknowledge his ongoing interest in our local Sri Lankan community. I also thank my colleagues who spoke before me. I want to begin by acknowledging the longstanding and ongoing friendship between Australia and Sri Lanka. This year marks 75 years of diplomatic relations between our two nations, a friendship that shares a proud history of joint cooperation in trade and investment, in education, in our love of sports and in culture and development. Our friendship is supported by a strategic partnership and is also characterised by mutual interests on shaping the future of our region. But it's the people-to-people links which stand out the most for me.

To that end, I'm very proud of my local Sri Lankan community, which is part of the very large Sri Lankan diaspora across Australia. Their ongoing contribution to the strength of Australian multiculturalism has been significant. Wherever we look, in the fields of education, media, culture, literature, science, medicine, politics, commerce and law, the people who make up the story of the Sri Lankan diaspora here in Australia continue to actively shape our understanding of modern Australia. In any one of these fields, there are prominent Sri Lankan Australians making their mark, and we value their contribution to our skilled migration program and our international education sector.

That is why I'm saddened to be marking this significant occasion against the backdrop of a significant economic crisis and civil unrest in Sri Lanka. There's been a long, systemic downfall of the Sri Lankan economy, with the country now having to import basic staples such as rice. Sri Lanka had been known to all of us, and to the world in general, to be one of the world's leading exporters of that commodity. Sri Lanka has lost a whole season of recovery in agriculture because of policies that were set in place primarily as a result of bad political decisions. Sri Lanka was the breadbasket of rice and tea in the world, with its products renowned globally for their quality and quantity, but those industries are now a shadow of their former selves.

The issues facing Sri Lanka are huge and complex. The lack of fuel has been impacting day-to-day mobility, with people unable to get to work and fuel set aside for emergency services only. Schools are closing down, and infrastructure is at a standstill. Food and fuel are rationed, with many families down to one or two meals a day. Tourism has also been severely impacted, with dire indicators, although it is now one of the only remaining sources of stability in an otherwise stunted economy in free fall. I welcome the Australian government's recent announcement of aid to support Sri Lanka's food and healthcare needs, which is in addition to the allocation in Australia's aid annual budget.

This motion is right to acknowledge the anxiety and distress that the Sri Lankan Australian community is experiencing as a result of these events. In speaking to this motion, I want to put forward the voices of people in my community who share the anxiety about this experience. I recently caught up with my good friend Chandra Bamunusinghe, who is a prominent leader in our local Sri Lankan community and who, in a recent meeting with members of the Aus-Lanka People's Solidarity, shared concerns regarding the impact of the use of terrorism laws now active in Sri Lanka, with arbitrary arrests of university students, union leaders and people associated with the protest movement.

My local community is calling for the implementation of the constitutional rights to democracy, freedom of speech and freedom of protest, both in the spirit and the letter of the law. This parliament should share the position held by my constituents, because strengthening regional norms and rules based order requires a commitment to human rights. Australia has been a strong supporter of human rights and reconciliation in Sri Lanka, and I want to see this emphasis as a basis of our relationship continuing into the future.

My local Sri Lankan community maintains very strong links to Sri Lanka, and it is a community that is proud of its diversity and celebrates the different religions, languages and ethnicities that make up the island country. I visited Sri Lanka on a parliamentary delegation some 10 years ago and was very much moved by the beauty of the country, matched by the warmth of its people. At that time, their hope and optimism for the future was palpable. While, sadly, the situation now remains dire, I place my confidence in the people of Sri Lanka to overcome this period of turmoil. They are a people whose ingenuity and resilience remain marked features of their proud national identity. I'd like to see us as Australians, and this parliament, aid and assist the people of Sri Lanka as they move forward into the future.

Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The time allocated for the debate has now expired.